That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

Yes. In fact, I think more people are sympathetic to the “world we leave our children/grandchildren” appeal than they are to the “do you want to world to be shit when you’re 90?” one. Because, while nobody wants to die, nobody really thinks they’re going to live to be 90 either.

Of course there will be water shortages the way people waste it. Happily the privacy loving Russians will save us:

Dmitry Kozak, the deputy prime minister responsible for the Olympic preparations, reflected the view held among many Russian officials that some Western visitors are deliberately trying to sabotage Sochi’s big debut out of bias against Russia. “We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day,”

@dedc79: On the plus side the Jellyfish of the future will probably have evolved to come right up on land, to your door, and possibly to sit down at your table. Though who will be for dinner might be up for grabs.

@ruemara: Citations please. The linked article cites the actual scientific article published in Science, a peer-reviewed journal. IANA(Climate scientist), but the one thing I keep hearing consistently from them is that events and changes are happening faster than the models predict.

1. They were always scary
2. The arrival date is getting much closer.
3. The arrival predictions are consistently outdone by the next years facts – see climate change.
4. William Simon(?) was right in the 1970’s but wrong going forward.
5. It is no longer scary predictions, but scary reports of facts on the ground.

Isn’t it that even though (on average) there was normal economic growth for the last 30 years, real wages for the working class have actually declined during that period? So the only thing Mr. Baker has to do to see that he is wrong is to look back a bit.

@monkeyfister: Jellyfish already are used in Japanese food. And since we’re on the subject, overfishing is one reason why I feel like an asshole eating sushi, and generally don’t. Ramen is better anyway.

Last year I read this book, Arcadia, by Lauren Goff. It’s fiction, so I get that’s different, but the last part of the book takes place in the not-too-distant future and describes what seems to me to be a very plausible climate-change ravaged world where bizarro diseases morph quickly into pandemics and the cities are filled with homeless people uprooted from their homes, and food becomes scarce and expensive — and let me add, that’s not even the point of the book, the book is about something else, it’s just the world she created but damn it seems entirely real to me.

@eric: Wingnuts tend to group fish along with arugula and brown mustard as Scary Liberal food that depletes one’s vital essences. If it’s not some form of pink slime from the freezer section, they’re not eating it.

The oceans are in trouble, but the date is bullshit–more so the idea that we could bound a date by a decade on either side. Supportable extrapolating from current trends, but more another unproductive scare tactic from the scientific community than any reasonably likely depiction of the future. There are so many uncertainties that go into projections like these, not least the unknown unknowns that should have scientists more careful about making these kinds of predictions. It’s far off enough that there’s no accountability; a publishable, high profile result from simple math that has no chance of being true in the real world. Ahh modern ecology.

“Let’s face it,” Robertson said, “there was a Bishop [Ussher] who added up the dates listed in Genesis and he came up with the world had been around for 6,000 years.”

“There ain’t no way that’s possible,” he continued. “To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.”

“Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves.”

“We’ve got to be realistic,” he concluded, and admit “that the dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn’t comport with anything that is found in science and you can’t just totally deny the geological formations that are out there.”

Before the spotted owl ruined America and stole our precious Freedoms, the scramble to “harvest” the scant remaining stands of western old growth timber was mindboggling. It was bascally a mob coming to the sudden realization: “Holy shit, we missed a spot!” and sprinting at full tilt with running chainsaws to see who’d get their firstest.

I’d ask, “Have you taken time to think this through, at least a little?” Yeah, I’m a scamp.

Delurking fish biologist here…this is an older study (2006) that was controversial at the time due to many flaws. For one thing, they were counting the number of fish stocks that had collapsed, but did not account for the fact that many of them had been able to recover under better management. (not to mention that putting a 2048 date on things is just pretty sensationalistic) A later study by the same lead author and some of his critics showed that many global fisheries are healthy and sustainable, even if a lot of them are in trouble.

Fish farming is big. A story in 2009 gave the percentage as >50% farmed. Downside according to that article is that a lot of the farming uses fishmeal and fish oil as feed. I imagine that is partially a matter of economics though.
The point is that if farming is cheaper than harvesting wild fish and stays that way, then it will dominate, maybe take some of the pressure off the wild stocks. (Yes, there are environmental problems with farming, including disease.)

@Glidwrith: The paper cited by DougJ is from 2006. A later paper (also by B. Worm et al) from science in 2009 is less grim. Not good, certainly, but not as grim as the 2006 paper suggests. I’ve linked to Worm et al 2009 below. The US has actually done a decent job (relatively speaking and recently) of maintaining and protecting fish stocks, to the best of my limited knowledge. The issue is figuring out the best regulatory framework for different types of fisheries and different communities.

Good day for this post. The GOP is trying to squeeze a few more votes out of the increasing purple Central Valley*, so the House, mostly on GOP votes passed a bill to ‘help’ California with its drought. Basically to decide from Washington DC what is the best way for California to split the inadequate water supply between the coast and Central Valley agriculture.

It is almost entirely a rerun of ‘Fish or Farmers’ theme from past California droughts. Heard a Central Valley House GOPer saying on news this morning (this is a close paraphrase), forget the salmon, they’re gone for a hundred years’. Bascially he was saying to just eff it and let CA salmon and steelhead go extinct.

It would be interesting to see how well Central Valley mega-agri-corps, say in the Westlands Water District make out in this bill, compared to small vegetable, fruit and tree nut farmers. I wonder how much some Hmong farmers down by Fresno with 40 acres of veggies fair in the GOP bill.

Boehner kicked off the effort late last week when he visited the Central Valley to do some rabble rousing (er… I mean, Congressional research and listening tour). (Edit: so you know a whole lot of research and thought went into the bill, at least in terms of 2014 elections if nothing else).

But, it is DOA in the Senate. But interesting case study in how low the GOP will go.

Meanwhile, meteorologists say half a foot of water coming CA’s way between now and next Monday. First storm in the series passed by coast last night. Two or three more of these, and CA will be in standard major drought disaster mode (a la 1970s) not total mega drought disaster mode. So, I hope for a few more storms over next 7 weeks.

*Still red as an old fashioned fire engine in extreme north and south, but quite purple in between.

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048. That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish

You might have mentioned that you are linking to an article over seven years that has been ridculed and debunked. You might also have mentioned that one of the authors of that paper later contributed to another article which contradicted its findings.

Appears the movie Soylent Green was far more correct about the future than any other movie – worse, Soylent Green’s predictions are getting more accurate every passing year; lets see, the top 0.01% own most all the wealth, global warming is occurring big time, oceans are failing … brings new meaning to the old line “Bring out your dead … .”

This oceans aren’t going to be “empty of fish” — it’s just that there will be few or no commercially viable fisheries left in a couple of decades if overfishing and climate change aren’t checked. And if stocks of fish like sardine and anchovy also collapse, as they have in a lot of places, you can also kiss most aquaculture goodbye. Where do you think all the farmed salmon you’re eating gets its feed? So there will be fish, just not any you can buy in a store anymore, or afford even if they did have it.

@Trollhattan: yes. that is true. Been a few new water districts established around the Central Valley near the Westlands corporate welfare project, to get ready to do that battle. Some relatives signed up for one of the new ones established to firm up claims on some the water they might go after.

I hope for three or four more storm systems between now and middle of April to ease the drought to standard CA drought disaster levels.

Heard on the news CA has a pineapple express system on its way. Not sure whether that is one of the fronts coming through this weekend, or another one.

BJers whould pray to the God or FSM of their choice now, not only will it help CA, but deflate a cheap ruthless immoral GOP plan at election year pandering..

@WaterGirl: I read that and instantly heard the wingnuttosphere bleat “but what about the lakes and rivers?” Because there’s just no way we can fish all the trout out of the stream fishing the way Grandpa showed us donchano.

When the ocean really is out of fish. And even then, someone will say “well, there are fish in privately stocked fishery lake X, so I don’t see why this is a problem”. Because people suck.

This.

Climate change is one of these issues I don’t talk about much because I really don’t know what the fuck to do. Anything that could be done is contingent on enough people pulling their heads out of their asses for long enough to start paying attention to the science, and in a country where half the country flat-out refuses to believe in evolution (of any kind, including “intelligent design” where you think it happens but there’s still a God who made it happen that way) and thinks scientists are a liberal conspiracy to turn America socialist, that just isn’t happening. And because people are used to seeing the weather as something completely beyond their control, fewer of them make the connection than they do when you’re talking about, say, economic conditions.

And on the other hand, global warming’s effects on the planet make for a problem several orders of magnitude larger than anything economic or political. At least when I look at the state of the economy, I can tell myself that if we ever do finally pull our heads out of our asses (as we did in the first half of the 20th century), we’ll be able to make things better. I’m not at all certain that that’ll be the case with global warming.

From what I’ve read, a big reason for the decline and death of fish populations is because of the anticipated loss of phytoplankton. Phytoplankton provides at least 50% of the world’s oxygen. This is a dire situation.

Nature is of course extremely complicated, and all the systems that support that lake are going to be gone also. In ways we will not know how to fix.

Oh, but just spend 20 seconds debating this with a colossal jackass like Rush Limbaugh, and you’ll learn he already has all the answers figured out. And he’ll be happy to lecture you from the vast depth of his biological sciences degree and knowledge of animal husbandry he picked up while sitting on his butt in front of a microphone.

Appreciate the people who noticed that this was an older article and the author has provided decidedly less grim predictions in later papers. I just don’t see “an ocean devoid of fish” happening, ever. It may not have a lot of fish, and the remaining fish may be tough and nasty and unpalatable to us, but there will be fish of some kind. Hell, they’ve made it through rough conditions in the past. http://www.skepticalscience.co.....rming.html

I was glad too, but I wanted to comment on GOPer pandering over CA drought.

Lot’s of interesting things will survive in the oceans as they respond to carbon dioxide driven global warming. From a geologist’s point of view, these funny life forms come and go through the ages as the rocks, fluids (mainly water) and gases do their thing.

On the other hand, from the point of view of human economics, there are problems with fisheries and extinctions right now, you don’t have to make fancy prediction models to see those.

So, not sure what the point is, of focusing on these dramatic predictions, which are just predictions of models that cannot be directly verified. And if you wait until they are directly verified, it is long too late. Because for an economic and humanitarian catastrophe for humankind, you don’t have to wait until extinction. Just until it gets too expensive to catch all the fish you need to feed people in various parts of the world, or the fish become so rare and populations so small and isolated, there is high probability that they will go extinct no matter what humans do.

Ultimately the projections are really tricky because a key component (melting of permafrost releasing methane) has an incredible exponential behavior (some melting -> moar greenhouse -> moar melting) which means that very slight variations of when the process is estimated to take hold mean large variations of conditions a while later.

I’m sure some RW loons will pick up on this to try to discredit the result, but ultimately it’s more like a man who’s sitting on a barrel of nitroglycerin and pounding it with a hammer deciding that – since it’s hard to predict EXACTLY when it will explode – that doing so is somehow “safe” and he should keep it up. Works right up until it doesn’t…

@MomSense: I think you are thinking of the 2010 paper Boyce et al (also with Worm as a coauthor) which claimed that there had been a drastic decline in phytoplankton over the past century (about 1% loss per year). This was an interesting paper, and a good effort to combine the current satellite based global observations to a longer term data set of Secchi disk measurements, but was basically problematic for a couple of reasons.

1. The long term time-series sites (in the Sargasso sea at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-Series and the Hawaii Ocean Time-series in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre) have about 25 years of data and don’t show declines in chlorophyll over that time period. CALCOFI has a longer data set and also doesn’t show a declining trend. Data are available at the respective websites of the programs.

2. The work of Boyce et al used secchi disk measurements to get historical phytoplankton biomass (using chlorophyll as a proxy). One problem is that they used one equation to fit a line between secchi disk measurements and chlorophyll for all ocean basins. Each ocean basin is unique and different things contribute unequally to Secchi disk measurements in each ocean basin (like the amount of minerals and colored dissolved organic matter), which is likely to bias the resulting fit.

See responses (also in Nature) by Mackas, Rykaczewski and Dunne, and McQuatters et al.

Well, it sounds like an awful lot of fish to kill off. But, it isn’t that much ocean to poison. I can see it happening. I can see it happening with terrifying speed. Don’t think to yourself that something is too big for us to destroy. I think it was Teller who said our extinction will come from our inability to comprehend exponential growth, and we definitely have the potential to exponentially spread some noxious problem across our planet in no time, these days.

I think “an ocean devoid of fish” is highly unlikely, but I could easily see “an ocean devoid of fish edible by humans.” Fish like this guy are probably safe from over-fishing (though they will probably have issues with their prey fish).

ETA: Also, too, “an ocean devoid of fish” would necessarily mean “an ocean completely devoid of life.” No dolphins, no whales, no pelicans, no penguins, no squid, no octopuses, nada, nothing. That’s what makes me skeptical of the “devoid of fish” claim — it’s actually a claim that there would be no ocean life at all since so many non-fish ocean dwellers eat fish.

I think of the whole kerfuffle as a rounding error. “None” versus “hardly any” are effectively the same thing. It’s a stone fact we’re conducting our time here on the planet as a mass-extinction event quite like a meteor strike. Taken on the right time scale, they’re identical.

@Bill Arnold: You know what? If this is really the world that my generation leaves to my son’s generation, I will be the first volunteer to hop into the giant blender at the Soylent Green factory because I’ll deserve it.